Luminarium [Format Kindle]

This was an interesting novel. Deeper than I expected it to be. It takes a brave author to dive into the vast realm of spirituality and build a compelling story around it. Shakar has quite a flair for seeing things in a unique light. The prose is wickedly smart. For the most part I enjoyed that aspect of it.

But it's not going to be a good fit for everyone. It's not an easy read, in either the depth of the text or in length. It's not a hard science-fiction novel, but I think it will appeal to the same sort of reader (lots of hard-science concepts and related terminology).

It's difficult to say what this book is about because it's about so many things: the meaning of life, the role of religion, how or if science explains religion, and the metaphysical that can't be explained any other way. "Faith without ignorance." It also explores the FPS/MMO realm via Urth, a virtual reality simulation of the real world, a look at just how real a fake world can get (and therefore become to people).

On the surface, this novel chronicles Fred Brounian's life struggles following the loss of his company and his mysteriously comatose twin-brother. But it also examines the nature of the universe, the nature of reality. It spans many quasi-religious viewpoints over the course of Fred's spiritual discovery, exploring a host of different spiritual/psychological ideologies in subtle ways. Hinduism plays a major role, along with reiki.

On an intellectual level I liked this novel. I enjoyed his sessions in the NYU study. I found the parallels between neuroscience and commonly perceived spiritual experiences very interesting. The mysterious email thread starts off well but goes way too far out on a limb as far as suspension of disbelief goes, which is the case for the last third of the novel.

Good character development. I really liked Mira. Very disappointed that Shakar chose to perpetuate the notion women are attracted to men who stalk them though.

Unfortunately, the novel's entertainment value just wasn't there. It's written in a stream of consciousness way, which at times is rather distracting from what's actually happening in the book. I thought a bit too much emphasis was placed on spirituality, to the point where it felt forced and artificial. A few elements were too far-fetched.

I often found myself wondering where the story was going. It touches on a lot of things as Fred goes about his life, but it never feels like it goes anywhere. Things just seem to happen, ones that aren't particularly interesting either. The length of the book is partly to blame. I'd estimate it's 150,000+ words. With the exception of one plot thread, nothing really happens in the book. Since this is a l-o-n-g book, there's really no excuse. Like a true spiritual journey, it's rather aimless and fairly boring.

In conclusion: deep on intellect but not much of a page-turner. The total package of the novel didn't do much to interest me. It was very hard to stick with it because I didn't care what was happening. I would've rather read a non-fiction book on the same subject.

The premise of LUMINARIUM is that spirituality is available to everyone--even people with no faith in anything. At the center of his spiritual awakening is a study Fred Brounian enrolls in that claims to try to help participants embrace "faith without ignorance"--the idea that it's possible to have a spiritual experience without believing in God (or taking any leaps, as it were). Fred is the perfect test subject. He has lost everything: the company of which he was CEO has been victim of a hostile takeover, and his job dissolved. His identical twin brother, counterpart in all things in life, has been in a non-responsive coma for six months. His money is gone, because he's paying for George's medical bills. His girlfriend dumped him, and he's living at home with his parents. Not only does he not have faith in anything, he is in a pretty generally hopeless place.

Alex Shakar has jam-packed LUMINARIUM with arcane tidbits about global religions and concepts of spirituality. I had to force myself to read slowly to make sure I was absorbing all the interesting details, which coalesce into a powerful general theory about human needs and connections. I also really appreciated the dynamic amongst the brothers (Fred, his twin George, and their younger brother Sam). Although the plot begins in a dark valley of the hero's life, the story is rich with themes of family, moral rightness, hope, and transcendence.

I was so taken by Fred Brounian, the unlikely hero of Alex Shakar's Luminarium, I was almost afraid to commit to Fred's ultra-inquiring, almost pathological puzzlement as he searched for answers in his urban, spiritual, video game-designing life. You see, I've been taken with POV characters like Fred before, mostly in other PoMo novels. They end up sucking the goodness out of anyone kind enough to bear them witness, and often the author gives no consoling irony or humor to make the reader understand it was a just a long, sort-of interesting exploration of unhappiness. But something told me Luminarium was different, that Fred was different; that he was actually taking unhappiness head on in his search for real joy, even if just a moment of it. And I was right.

The setting of Luminarium is weird and dark like many Sci-Fi, PoMo novels, but funny from the very first few pages, and that's where my love for the book began. The characters are treated with real respect and kindness, even in the midst of crisis and unending despair. There is soaring science and difficult parallel universes, but the world of Luminarium is forever shifting: sometimes it's bleak, sometimes hopeful, sometimes impossibly transforming, and sometimes downright ordinary, so much so that you might think you're reading a Russian novel. But you're not. Because Fred is both acutely aware of his alienation, and fiercely pursuant of its end, his suffering, the reader knows, is temporary. The salvation comes in its quirky way, way more like real life than fiction.

When post modernism ends, Luminarium will be the first sign of life.